The Sandra TextsScene 4

The degree to which a thing is passionate is often
commensurate with the degree to which its end is violent.
This is no new truth. So it was for Joshua and Katherine's
season of lovemaking. Twice he exploded. Twice our young
hero lost control of himself as never before he had, as never
again he would. Coming from a nature as quiet as his, as
inward, as detached, it was a shock to both of them.

"That is not me!" Joshua shouted into the lee of the
first of these storms. He pointed at a glass he had just
thrown across the room. The glass had been full of water.
Joshua ripped at his coat then grittingly, his eyes wide, his
fists jamming themselves fiercely into its pockets. He burst
out into the mid-winter night.

The tender passions, the easy love of the summer
previous ceased at the dawn of this new semester. The
heaviest class-load of his career Joshua carried. He was
editing, too, the news pages of the campus newspaper. He
spent all of his hours, therefore, in class, at the paper,
and studying. And Katherine spent all of her evenings,
therefore, in their tiny one-room efficiency, neglected,
taken for granted.

The stress of Joshua's workload and the mounting demands
of pining Katherine planted in him a volatility. It was a
volatility that sent him on this Friday night stomping
through the central Kansas snow, rattled at how he had lost
control of himself.

Joshua paced. Joshua paced and paced and cooled and
wondered at himself until eventually Katherine found him.
Katherine drove him back to thaw.

Later they mistakenly blamed the contradictory rhythms of
their lives for this outburst. She, eight-to-five at the
Russian language lab, few pressures, evenings free. He,
harried around the clock. This they blamed, this and the
lingering shock of their blissful summer's end. They were
smarting under the onset of reality, they believed.

But a year later it happened again.

Not a glass this time, but a plate. Joshua stood
washing the dishes in their Indiana apartment. Joshua stood
arguing with Katherine in their Indiana apartment. Something
she said did it. Or something he thought pushed him out of
himself. Blindly, he thrust his fist into the sink.
Suddenly she was leaping for the telephone. Suddenly he was
staggering away from the sink, holding up his hand, stunned,
goggling at a leaf of skin hanging off a finger, watching his
blood soak into a rag. She drove him to the emergency room.
A medic stitched him up. "Temper meets tableware," Joshua
wryly explained.

But it was not so superficial. For, upon reflection,
Joshua saw that this conflict was the same conflict as the
year previous. It had not been those contradictory rhythms
of their lives. It had not been that onset of reality. It
had been something more.

"I can't study here," Joshua would tell Katherine. "Not
on the couch, with the television going and all."

Katherine would frown beneath her coal-black hair. Her
brows would knit beneath her coal-black hair.

"I have to have formal surroundings," Joshua would
finish. "Silence."

And so to the library he went every night, like the most
faithful of pilgrims, to continue his graduate work in Latin
American Studies. And so at home Katherine would remain
every night, neglected, taken for granted, to continue her
graduate work in Russian and East European Studies. Joshua
wanted to be left alone, to concentrate, to focus. Katherine
did not want to be left alone. This was the conflict. But,
even understanding this, Joshua could not compromise. And
slowly Katherine stopped forgiving him.

They met in bed, or passing on campus like two comrades,
or on Sundays for brunch and to sit in the park. This was
their new season. By the beginning of their second year in
Indiana their lovemakings had dwindled to arguments over
lovemakings. And every bout of sex was to him a conquest, was
from her a gift. Many types of air now, there were, aside
from her breath. Many kinds of shapes now, there were, aside
from his phallus. Time had become a clock. The season a
semester.